After letting it slip that Game of Thrones’ final season wouldn’t be airing until 2019, actress Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark on the series, just gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter about the lead-up to the fantasy series’ final stretch. This time, however, she kept any revealing details close to the vest, instead focusing on the “bittersweet” experience of reading the script for the series finale, which, just so you’re aware, now exists in the corporeal world.
“All of us have always had discussions about theories about what we think is going to happen—who’s going to die, who’s going to end up ruling,” Turner says. “Now, we know. It almost feels like another one of our theories. It doesn’t even feel like it’s what’s actually happening. It’s very satisfying.”
More striking, however, is Turner’s description of the room in which the cast and crew all read the finale. It’s easy to imagine just how emotional it was for everyone, especially performers like Turner, Maisie Williams, Kit Harrington, and Isaac Hempstead Wright, all of whom essentially came of age on the set of the series.
Turner describes it thusly:
It was very, very bittersweet. The first day of the actors coming in and that kind of production starting, the day where we had the final read-through for the final script, it was really bittersweet. It was hard. At the end of the very last script, they read aloud, “End of Game of Thrones.” As soon as they read that out, pretty much everyone burst into tears. There was a standing ovation for [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss]. We were all clapping and cheering. It was amazing. It was the first time every single castmember had been there and sat through all of the scripts for season eight — obviously not castmembers who had died in the earlier seasons, but …
All that said, there’s always the chance that any of the aforementioned actors weren’t even there, what with characters dying left and right on the show. Some have theorized that Turner’s presence at the reading indicates that Sansa makes it to the end, but, like, who really thinks Sansa will die? Bran will go before she does.
Turner also offers up some vague talk of what the final season look like, and it all sounds about right for a show that just changed the game by introducing an ice dragon into the mix. She mentions “bigger and more fantastical elements” that will “really [emerge]” on this go-around. She also mentions that “some people who are disappointed” because “they will want certain people to end up in certain places.”
Whether or not that all adds up to “the greatest thing that’s ever aired on TV,” as Jason “Khal Drogo” Momoa recently claimed, remains to be seen. For a long time.